Alicia Roth Weigel testifies on intersex history and healthcare inequity

Howdy.

My name is Alicia Roth-Weigel, and I don't usually read.

I usually just speak off the cuff.

I didn't know I had four minutes.

This feels like a luxury.

I have twice the time, so I'm going to take like a breath.

So yeah, my name is Alicia Roth-Weigel.

I'm testifying today as adjunct faculty at CUNY, where I teach a course on sex and gender in Hunter College's sociology department.

So would consider myself an expert professionally in this regard.

Also personally as an intersex person.

And I'm also speaking as a former resident of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which I can tell you looks quite different than when I lived there over a decade ago.

Certainly wasn't an Apple store.

But one face that does look familiar to me is Councilmember Caban.

Who has been working on the issue of intersex autonomy for five plus years now, at least since she attended a rally that I co-organized at Weill Cornell Medical College back in 2021 and was attended and worked on by multiple other people

in this room.

We have been fighting this fight for a very long time and appreciate Councilmember Caban's ongoing support.

That protest was also featured in...

the Emmy-nominated documentary Everybody, which premiered at Tribeca Film Festival.

So all of this is to say that New York City has been and continues to be vital in the course of intersex history, which thus far has been ignored by most of the world, but one day will make it into history books.

I was originally connected with Councilmember Caban while serving on the City of Austin's Human Rights Commission, where I served for eight years before moving here to, as I mentioned, now teach at CUNY.

And at that time, serving on Austin's Human Rights Commission, we worked to incorporate language from New York City's 2019 legal enforcement guidance on discrimination into all of Austin's local non-discrimination ordinance policies.

So we did codify intersex protection into city law, but with reference to hormonal and chromosomal differences without explicitly referencing our community by name.

And while this change might seem minor, might seem incremental, it's not for a largely invisible community

who has pretty much always been ignored and whose needs sometimes overlap with that of transgender individuals, though not always.

And yet we are frequently, and this is me going off the...

cuff again, lumped in with protections for trans folks in ways that don't adequately meet our medical needs, our

unique needs in terms of protection from discrimination that, again, often overlap with transgender folks, but often do not and are unique to intersex people.

So our struggle has always been lumped into that one rather than being seen as valid and acted on in its own right.

And so I think explicitly listing us as a protected class would be an important step in the right direction, that we are also a valid community that deserves human rights.

In that vein, beyond legal statute, this body could make a tangible difference in many lives by helping to bring Callan Lord to the table to rectify the huge health care inequity

faced by intersex people through the provision of intersex-specific care for adult patients, which would be replicating work that we pioneered via kind clinics across the state of Texas.

Again, this work has already been done in Texas, mind you.

And so I feel like we could easily do it in New York.

We just need Callan Lord to reply to intersex people slash care about intersex people.

I'd be happy to provide guidance on that or otherwise.

And I thank you for reaffirming that in the absence of federal representation, we can still make big things happen through the power of local organizing.

So thanks for listening.